With the release of the
Windows April 2018 Update, we chat with Microsoft engineers
about three exciting features that Insiders voted as part of their
top 10 favorites.

Tom Alphin joins Jason Howard in the studio to talk about
Timeline, a new, chronological way to keep track of all your stuff,
including across multiple devices. Jake Cohen chats about Eye
Control, an accessibility feature that Microsoft developed with the
help of Steve Gleason, an NFL football player for the New Orleans
Saints who is living with ALS. And Samuele Dassatti, an
18-year-old Windows Insider from Italy, shares his experience
developing his app, Fluenty, using Fluent Design.

Then, Dona Sarkar and Jason have a candid discussion about what
it's really like to be a Microsoft engineer and evolve an operating
system used by more than a billion users worldwide.

Episode Transcription

JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows
Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Howard, and this
is Episode 15: Updates and Features and Engineers—Oh,
My!

This episode, we'll chat with Microsoft engineers about Timeline
and Eye Control, as well as a Windows Insider about Fluent
design. All three of these features were voted by insiders as
part of the top ten features within this update.

Later, Dona Sarkar and I will chat about what it's really like
to evolve an operating system used by more than a billion users
worldwide.

JASON HOWARD: To talk about the new
Timeline feature today, we have Tom Alphin. Welcome to the
show.

TOM ALPHIN: Thank you.

JASON HOWARD: So could you please
introduce yourself to the audience and tell them what you do here
at Microsoft?

TOM ALPHIN: Sure. So I'm Tom
Alphin. I've been working at Microsoft for about 15, 16
years. Been on the Windows team for most of that, and most
recently, as you introduced me, I've been working on the Timeline
feature.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: And for those who may not
be familiar, or may not have watched some of the webcasts we do,
back in December of 2017, we did a little demo -- what was
it? About a week early before the Timeline feature showed up
Insider builds?

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Actually had you on the
air, got to do some demos -- they worked.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Which was awesome.
(Laughter.) Doing live demos is always a risky
proposition.

So for those that are listening to the show and may not be
familiar with the functionality, since it's just now like properly
releasing to the public, can you give us a bit of a rundown on what
Timeline is?

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Before talking
about Timeline itself, it's worth speaking for a moment about what
problem we think Timeline solves.

We identified some years ago that people were struggling to find
their stuff. It used to be that I knew where all my stuff
was. It was on my one laptop on the hard drive. And now
with a world of cloud services, OneDrive and Dropbox or whatever
your favorite storage solution is, it's kind of hard to find stuff
sometimes.

Or it might even be on the C drive of a different laptop.
And it's like, "Where's my stuff?"

And so rather than just trying to make sure even puts all their
stuff in one place, which of course we're investing in making
OneDrive a great place for your stuff, we also recognized, you
know, people are going to use a mix of things. So why don't
we give them one view of all their stuff? And it's organized,
actually, chronologically, not by physical storage location.
And that was sort of the conceptual journey that we went through to
get to the idea, "Hey, maybe we just give people a timeline of
their stuff." And that's the gist of it.

When we ended up, ultimately, shipping today is the ability for
users to click on the task view button that's been part of Windows
for a while now. Instead of just seeing what's running, you
can actually go back in time. And you're seeing your
chronological view of stuff you've done in the past. And from
that chronological view, you can click on something because you
want to get back to that document or that website, and it will just
launch.

And we've made it really easy. We're hoping people
habituate to that as an alternate way to go back and find things
they care about.

JASON HOWARD: And it seems like the name
was pretty easy to stumble upon, it kind of named itself.
(Laughter.)

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the name
of the feature kind of just is the essence of the feature.
Although, we use that name as a bit of a guiding principle.
We were, like, when we started thinking about search results in the
timeline experience, we could have organized the search results in
any manner of ways. We could have organized them by
application, we could have organized them by some sort of relevance
algorithm.

We chose, ultimately, to organize them chronologically because
we're, like, "This is Timeline, we've got to keep things organized
in a predictable, consistent way." And that bounding concept
is chronology. So reverse chronology, center of Timeline.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And, I mean, if
you've got files in five different locations and you're struggling
to remember where it was to begin with, right? Because if you
knew where it was, you could possibly just go and open the file and
be done with it. Having remembered when the last time you
worked on it, for some people, myself included here, it's probably
a little bit easier to do it that way as opposed to, okay, which PC
was this on or which, you know, cloud-based service did I upload
this to at what point in time? And all of a sudden, it's
like, oh, yeah, I worked on this on this other machine, it was two
days ago, cool. Zip back in time, and there you go.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So, basically,
we're giving people one more way to find their stuff. You can
already find it if you know where it is, go find it in File
Explorer, the appropriate app. You can already find it in
search if you know exactly what it's called. And now we've
got a way you can find it if you know when it happened.

JASON HOWARD: That's awesome.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like that was
a bit of the core of why the team was excited to create the
feature.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: So as an end user, right,
it sounds like they have this third kind of pillar of a way to go
and find files. But besides just finding something that they
had been working on, right? Like, how does this change the
game for users? Like, how does this improve their workflow
and make lives easier for them?

TOM ALPHIN: Well, we know that people use
computers in a lot of different ways. Some people will do
simple tasks, just get something done, move on. Other people
use it for more entertainment or shopping or any of these other
scenarios. And every one of those scenarios is going to have
a different use case or use pattern. And for each one of
them, they might use something like timeline differently.

If you're using it for shopping, it's great to be able to go
find that thing you were looking at a couple days ago because maybe
you saw something you really liked, but you weren't quite ready to
pull the trigger and buy it. You closed the Web browser, it's
pretty hard to find it again.

And now, you know, you just scroll back in Timeline, you can
find it, get back to it, make a purchase decision.

If you're doing a more complicated task, maybe you're working on
writing a book or trying to research a trip or any of these tasks
that take many days and many, many documents and objects it's going
to take you a while to build out that state. And then you've
got all the information at your fingertips, and then you have to
switch to something else, getting back to that stuff is challenging
and Timeline is one way we think people can do it more easily
because it's all there.

And since you're going back in time to two days ago when you
were looking at the trip planning, you'll see in that two days ago
area, other things that you're doing at the same time, it's very
likely those are the same things you want to bring back as
well.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. So instead of
finding just the one thing, you may have forgotten about something
else that's important and relevant that hadn't kind of clicked back
into your memory. And, you know, when you go back and find
this, it'll be sitting there waiting for you as well. And
you're, like, "Oh, my goodness, I completely forgot about
that."

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah.
Exactly.

JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like
everybody's going to get this kind of "one history to rule them
all" type, you know, experience, right? In a recent survey,
Windows Insiders chose Timeline as one of their top ten features
that is now going to be available in the April 2018 Update.
Obviously, it's now out in public.

From your perspective, are there any users, individually or in
particular, that you can think about that are going to be super
excited about this feature?

TOM ALPHIN: I think the feature is
valuable if you have exactly one Windows PC, but it's going to be
significantly more popular amongst people that have either multiple
PCs or multiple PCs and a phone where they're choosing to use
Office or Edge because then you can actually pick up the activities
across the device boundary. And that's really powerful
because once you find that cool website on your phone, trying to
get it off of your phone is a pain. And if I could just
change nothing about how I use my phone, but when I sit down at my
PC, I know with confidence if I go into my timeline it's going to
show me the stuff that I was viewing on my phone earlier today or
yesterday.

That is a bit of a game-changer because I don't have to change
how I use my phone. All I have to do is have confidence I can
get back to that stuff easy in the future.

JASON HOWARD: Well, even when you look at
individual applications, right, you look at Edge, and it can port
your favorites across different devices, right, correlated to your
Microsoft account. And there are other Web browsers out there
that will port your history and things like that so that, you know,
you're on PC A, you search something, gets correlated. But,
again, that's a separate profile that you have to have connected in
the background, things like that. Rather than having two or
three different profiles, or five different profiles across all
these different applications, at least in this type of scenario
where you have your one Microsoft Account that's connected to these
multiple machines, you don't have to worry about remembering five
accounts and five logins and tying all of that together. You
get to kind of have this one simplified, seamless experience where,
hey, this is the same login I have across multiple machines.
And guess what? All of this just happens seamlessly in the
background and the user experience seems like it's pretty
smooth.

TOM ALPHIN: That's right, yeah.
Because your activities are roaming between your devices based on
your Microsoft Account, so long as you use the same Microsoft
Account on both of the devices, you'll have the same
Timeline.

Actually, that's a good segue to another capability that's tied
up in Timeline is if I go from my first PC, where I do have a
particular application installed, to a second PC where I don't have
that application installed, we will actually help you when you
click on that activity from that app, get that app installed on
that second computer and we're really bridging the gap for the user
so they can really get right back exactly into the app and content
that they want on a device that maybe they don't use as often or
maybe that device is new to their ecosystem. And we're just
helping bridge the gap there.

We really think this will help the multi-device user a ton, and
again, that phone scenario is super cool. I can get back to
that Word document I was reading on the go super easily on my PC,
get back to that website. It's all really nicely integrated,
and we think that it will continue to grow as people habituate to
this and as developers embrace the platform that Timeline's built
on, you'll see more and more high-quality activity cards in
Timeline coming from the various apps you love.

JASON HOWARD: So, obviously, this is
available on Windows 10 across, you know, all the PCs that,
obviously, have taken this newest update, right? So the
Windows 10 April 2018 Update, you need to have that installed kind
of as the baseline, and that's when the feature will show
you.

So you mentioned mobile OS's. What mobile platforms is
this available on currently?

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So if you have
Edge on your iPhone or your Android device or your Office suite on
those platforms, those will be sources that activities can get
created back to appear on your PC. And it requires a new
version of Edge which either is out or is about to be out for that
to work properly, but Office is already working today.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Future
plans, right? I don't want you to give away the secret sauce,
right? I love asking this question because anybody I ever
talk to and ask them, "Hey, what are you doing next?" You
know, there's that mixture of, "I can talk about some of it, I
can't talk about some of it." Any cats you want to let out of
the bag?

TOM ALPHIN: Well, I actually can talk
about something, because we've already been talking about it for a
while.

At Build last year, almost exactly a year ago, because we're
getting ready for the next Build Conference, we made it very clear
to app developers that if you write these activities into the roam
APIs, they will make it into your timeline on all your PCs.
And that's a big deal.

What we're excited about is that we really think these
activities can showcase elsewhere in Windows. One example
that is already part of the product as well is if you switch
between devices and there's a strong signal that that activity you
were working on PC A is something you'd want to resume on a second
PC, we could offer a little notification for you, "Hey, would you
like to keep working on this?"

And we think that's the beginning of a whole host of ways to
infuse the Windows operating system with exactly what you need
next. And I can't speak to exactly what we're going to do
with that, because we're still kind of inventing the future,
right? But we know that these activities that the Microsoft
first-party applications and our third-party partners are creating,
that those activities are sort of at the center of a new type of
productivity in Windows.

JASON HOWARD: I know we've covered a lot
here, but anything else? Any other tips or tricks that you
want to share about Timeline? Obviously, people need to get
the newest build and get it installed so they can use it.

TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the main
point that people encounter when they play with it for the first
time is that we do want to make sure people's privacy are respected
in this experience. So you will see when you use it for the
first time, we do ask you if you'd like the activities from this PC
to go back up to the cloud so they can get to your other
devices.

We give you a couple days of Timeline, and then below that,
there's an experience built into Timeline to actually opt in and
move those activities back up to the cloud. So that's
something people will discover when they play with it for the first
time a little bit.

Another thing is I really encourage people to play with the
search capability as well because I kind of find the combination of
even an imperfect search term, I happen to love LEGO projects, so I
might search for LEGO. It gives me a filtered Timeline, which
is all of my stuff that has that keyword in it. So if I know
about when it was, but I'm not sure exactly which day, I can use
the combination of search, which filters the view, plus that sort
of temporal timeline view to find exactly what I'm looking
for.

So people should play with that as well. They don't feel
like they need to type enough search terms to find exactly that one
thing. Just get it down to a small enough set that you can
quickly scan and find what you're looking for. I think that's
probably a good tease for people. Really, we want to hear
from people, too. Because, you know, this is the beginning of
a story.

JASON HOWARD: And, obviously there's, you
know, the Feedback Hub to drive feedback for Insiders. If
you're on a retail build, you know you can provide feedback and
Feedback Hub as well.

TOM ALPHIN: Yes. And we've gotten
great feedback from the Insiders watching the initial response to
it when we went out end of last year and seeing what people had to
share and trying with the little time we had to respond in some
small ways has been really awesome. And not having that
opportunity would have made for a less polished product.

JASON HOWARD: Well, Tom, thank you so
much for stopping by the studio today.

TOM ALPHIN: Absolutely.

JASON HOWARD: It's been great talking to
you.

TOM ALPHIN: Thank you very much,
cheers.

JASON HOWARD: Cheers, man.

JASON HOWARD: We chat with our next
Microsoft engineer about Eye Control, one of several accessibility
features that the Windows team has really been investing in over
the last few years.

Jake, could you introduce yourself to our listeners?

JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. My name is
Jake Cohen, a program manager on the Windows Interaction Platform
team. And I was fortunate enough to work on Eye Control the
past few years and I'm really excited to talk about it.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Real quick,
for those who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about what
the Windows Interaction Platform team does?

JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So we work on
providing support for all input device types on Windows, both in
the operating system as well as public APIs for developers.
We provide support for mouse and keyboard, touch, pen, precision
touchpad, now eye tracking, the dial, and more.

JASON HOWARD: That's quite the
list. And it seems like there's a few important things that
users interact with Windows through. (Laughter.)

JAKE COHEN: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: So before we get into the
details of Eye Control, could you tell us a bit about accessibility
in general and how Windows is prioritizing accessibility features
as it evolves?

JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. I think it
really comes down to Microsoft's mission statement that Satya has
defined for us, and that we've been really working towards.
And it's all about empowering every person and organization on the
planet to achieve more.

So accessibility has been super important for us for the past
20-plus years. We've been working hard in the past few years
to really aspire towards our mission statement, and when we think
about accessibility, it's about empowering every person of every
level of ability.

And we've been taking a really focused approach to continue
improving our products to fill the gaps and help people use their
PCs and use Windows to improve their lives and do the things they
are passionate about.

JASON HOWARD: So, speaking about Eye
Control, can you tell us, you know, a little bit more about
it? Like, walk us through how it works and what it's like
using the feature.

JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So Eye Control is
a product, it's built into Windows, and it allows customers to
control their PC using only their eyes and a compatible
eye-tracking device. So it's built leveraging eye-tracking
technology, and it provides access to control a mouse, a keyboard,
and a text-to-speech experience to communicate with friends and
family, all with just your eyes.

JASON HOWARD: Wow. So is there some
sort of a camera that the user looks into? Or is it just like
kind of reading where a person's eyes are gazing across like a
pre-defined screen area?

JAKE COHEN: We work with eye-tracking
hardware that you can connect to your PC, and some devices have
them integrated. Two of our hardware partners that support
Windows is Tobii and now EyeTech, which is new for the April 2018
release.

What you do is you connect that device, and this uses infrared
lighting and cameras to basically detect where your eyes are
looking relative to the screen to allow you to interact with your
PC. And Windows takes that information and allows you to,
say, control a mouse or keyboard with where you're looking on the
screen.

JASON HOWARD: So are there, say, like
icons on the screen? Like, if you were trying to switch
between -- what would be, like, keyboard input versus using a mouse
to drag and drop and things like that? Are there, like, icons
that you would look at and almost virtually eye-click them
somehow?

JAKE COHEN: Exactly. Yes. So
Eye Control starts with a launch pad, which is UI that's always
present on the screen. And when you dwell your eyes on an
icon, which is the act of fixating your eyes somewhere on the
screen and waiting, it'll activate a click. So it's basically
a press and hold with your eyes.

And you have access on the launch pad to the mouse, to the
keyboard, to text-to-speech, and now in the April 2018 release,
many more options to quick access to start, task view, device
calibration, settings, and more. And this is really your
launching point to get to the action you want.

So if you want to, say, use the mouse to scroll a Web page, you
first look at the scroll button basically saying, "Hey, I want to
scroll." And once you're in that mode, you can fixate your
eyes somewhere on the screen and then use the arrows that are
provided to scroll up and down using your eyes. So lets you
browse the Web or scroll an app.

JASON HOWARD: Something interesting for
me, the difference between a left mouse click versus a right mouse
click?

JAKE COHEN: Yes. For that, we do
have individual UI for a left-click action and a right-click action
on the launch pad. We also have one option for precise mouse
interactions that let you position your eyes on the screen, fine
tune the position of the mouse, and then select what action you
want with that mouse, which could be right click, left click, or
double left click.

JASON HOWARD: That was going to be my
next question -- what happens between a single click versus the
double click?

JAKE COHEN: Yeah. And you raise a
really good point, too. There are a wide range of
interactions that are supported on Windows that people do every
single day. And it's quite a complex problem to provide
support for that with just your eyes.

You know, we're just getting started with providing support for
left click, right click, double left click for scrolling, for the
keyboard, but there's more interactions that we need to work
towards as well like zooming and drag and drop. And these are
really fun, complex problems to work towards to let someone do all
of these things with just their eyes.

JASON HOWARD: So what's the story behind
how Microsoft went about developing this eye-tracking feature?

JAKE COHEN: It's a very exciting
story. It started several years in the 2014 Microsoft
company-wide hackathon, and started with Steve Gleason, NFL
football player, New Orleans Saints, that is living with ALS.
Sent an e-mail and challenged Microsoft to help improve his life
with technology. A famous quote he has is, "Before we have a
cure for ALS, technology is that cure." And it brings up a
really good point. You know, as technology evolves and as
technology can do more and more for people, it helps fill the gap
and empower people to do things they couldn't do before.

And with that e-mail, there was a team got together, built a
hackathon project on eye tracking to let Steve drive his
wheelchair.

JASON HOWARD: Oh, wow.

JAKE COHEN: He can drive his wheelchair
with his son around his house, which is incredible. And from
there a team at Microsoft Research has dedicated their time the
last three years plus to building technology to help improve
people's lives that are living with mobility impairments, both with
eye tracking, as well as those who are blind.

And they've evolved and grown their technical expertise and have
learned a ton and are working with people living with ALS in the
community to learn more and work with them and help them
individually.

And in this past year, we found a point which there was a great
opportunity to bring all of this learning and opportunity right
into Windows, so more customers around the world can leverage this
technology in an easier way to help let them control their PC and
do what they want to do.

JASON HOWARD: Just thinking, you know,
you buy a new computer and you're booting up. Previously,
that out-of-box experience was very -- there were no audio cues or
anything.

JAKE COHEN: Right.

JASON HOWARD: You had to be able to see
what was on the screen.

JAKE COHEN: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: It required somebody of
full abilities to walk through the process, really. And now,
Cortana's integrated where she actually speaks to people.

JAKE COHEN: That's great.

JASON HOWARD: Right? There's
high-contrast mode included as part of the out-of-box
experience. It's like, piece by piece, we keep bringing
Windows closer and closer to those who may need some additional
assistance and going through what are just some of the common tasks
in using the operating system.

JAKE COHEN: It's a great evolution, I'd
say, of Windows and what we are doing to fulfill our mission
statement and to fill the gap and to help people with variations of
ability better use their PC, use their devices, have an impact on
their lives. And it's a really good trajectory we're on to
really be customer focused and focused on the end to end solution,
not tools that you can plug in and use in certain scenarios, but
what is the from beginning to end, I get my PC, I'm started, I'm
booted up. I can now use it on my day-to-day, I can use it at
work and transition to future devices and updates as well.

JASON HOWARD: So knowing that we kind of
have a habit around here of starting a good thing and then opening
up a bit more broadly so that additional third parties and users
externally can kind of plug in and take it to the next level, what
is the future past what we've done so far? Do you have any
plans for, like, APIs or anything that you're going to do to try to
enable developers to kind of build on top of what you all have
already put together?

JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. This is one
of the things I'm most excited about for this next release of
Windows.

In the Fall Creators Update, we released Eye Control in box for
the first time. In the April 2018 Update, we have really
great improvements to Eye Control, but the next step we're taking
as well is releasing public developer APIs and open-source
libraries that was used exactly the same in Windows to build Eye
Control to allow third-party developers to build apps and
experiences that can leverage eye tracking.

And imagine all of the gaps that third-party developers can fill
for customers who are living with mobility impairments to use in
their day-to-day life. You know, I think it comes down to
Microsoft's core roots. We can't fulfill this mission
statement alone to empower everyone, we have to empower everyone to
empower other people and to build a platform. We're a
platform company, and this what I'm most excited for next is to see
what developers can think of and come up with and build and make an
impact.

JASON HOWARD: Seems to be one of the
things that we as a company are good at is we put together a solid
foundation that has the right hooks and integrations into the OS,
and then open the door and see what other people can come up
with.

JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So these APIs
just came out and we're showing them off at Build and we're excited
to see what comes next.

JASON HOWARD: What are some of the next
things that you think are super important that you and the rest of
your team will be working on?

JAKE COHEN: We take a very
customer-centric approach, especially for Eye Control, since it is
designed for a targeted set of audience and people who really need
it.

We've been working closely with Microsoft Research and people
living with ALS in the community, as well as Team Gleason, a
nonprofit foundation that helps people who are living with ALS, to
collect feedback, to let them use Eye Control and tell us what
works great, what's missing, and what's needed next.

And it's really inspiring to get this feedback because we hear
people say, "This is amazing technology, this is really helping
me." And also, "This is the next thing I need." It's
about empowering them to do everything they can think of, not just
a subset of interactions or abilities.

And that's what's driving the next steps is collecting feedback
and addressing the next top things that people want to do in
Windows.

JASON HOWARD: So for you individually,
what drove you to become part of the Windows Interaction Platform
team? Like, what landed you here?

JAKE COHEN: Well, it started with a
really strong interest in thinking about how we're evolving the way
we interact with devices and technology -- the evolution of the
smart phone and touch interactions being such a huge player in how
we use these devices, and how that's changing the way we work and
live with voice as a key interaction being more predominant today
with voice-activated assistants, as well as smart home
speakers.

And it's just really exciting to think about how we can push the
boundary and make things and PCs more natural and intuitive to use
and just make it more smooth throughout your day-to-day life.
And eye tracking is a really exciting space where there's a very
natural aspect to where your eyes are looking on the screen and
what that intent is and what you're thinking and doing, and can
help you if you are only using your eyes, as well as if you're
fully able and can use other modalities to do multi-modal
interactions. So the interaction space is very, very
cool.

JASON HOWARD: Well, Jake, thank you so
much for thinking the time to be here with us today to talk about
eye tracking. No doubt, it's something that has a very long
and bright future ahead of it. Can't wait to see what's
coming next.

JAKE COHEN: Yeah, that's so much.
It's been really fun.

JASON HOWARD: For our third feature
today, we'll be chatting about Fluent design. Fluent design
is a new design language for Windows 10 with guidelines for designs
and interactions covering components such as light, depth, motion,
material, as well as scale.

Fluent design makes applications look great across all types of
Windows-powered devices.

Speaking on this topic today is Samuele Dassatti, a Windows
Insider who developed his own productivity and scheduling app
called Fluently, which is now available in the Microsoft
store. Samuele is only 18 years old, and has been coding
since he was 13. He's using the proceeds from this
application to pay for university.

Welcome, Samuele, where are you calling from today?

SAMUELE DASSATTI: I'm from Italy, in the
northern region of Italy.

JASON HOWARD: All right. So, tell
us a little bit about your app. Can you give the audience a
walk-through of what your application does and what prompted you to
create it?

SAMUELE DASSATTI: Well, my app is a
digital diary with the support for the Surface Pen. I decided
to create it because in my school, we use a tablet instead of
books. And I needed a way to write on my Surface Pro, my
notes as if I were writing on paper.

So I started developing this UWP app, Fluently, and I really
liked the Fluent design system, which was presented at Build 2017
so I decided to implement it in my app. And the fact that the
app looked so beautiful made me proud of it and I, ultimately,
decided to publish it on the Windows Store in October or
so.

And after I published it, I was nominated for the Windows
Developer Awards 2018, so it's a great result for me.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So your
application basically lets you keep a calendar and notes by
handwriting on a Surface with the Surface Pen. So it seems
like it's good for people who like the feeling of paper, but want
the flexibility of a digital calendar, it seems like those would be
the kind of people that would love your application
Fluently.

SAMUELE DASSATTI: Yeah. From what
I've seen, many of the people that write me usually come from pen
and paper, maybe they add a Surface or a similar device with pen
support, but they use it not that often, and maybe just for some
basic sketching. But after seeing Fluently and acknowledging
how intuitive it was, many of them thank me because I gave them a
reason to use their Surface or XPS two-in-one, for example.

JASON HOWARD: Just in talking, right, we
heard a little bit about you, that you were self-taught when it
comes to coding, and you started when you were 13. Obviously,
you're a bit older now and you're about to start university, so can
you tell us a little bit about your plans and, you know, what
you're dreaming about for the future?

SAMUELE DASSATTI: I just got admitted at
the University of Trento, near where I live, which I heard is a
really good university for computer science. And I want to
study programming there because I believe coding opens many doors
in the future because it is required almost everywhere, and I hope
that the fact that I have some experience may help me in the
university.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Thank you so
much for stopping by the studio today.

SAMUELE DASSATTI: Thank you for the
opportunity.

JASON HOWARD: Ever wonder what it's like
to be an engineer on the Windows Insider team and to be part of the
massive rush that is evolving the most popular operating system in
the world?

Dona Sarkar joins me in the studio to talk about the joys and
headaches of engineering.

DONA SARKAR: Hi, Jason.

JASON HOWARD: Hi, Dona.

DONA SARKAR: What are you doing?
You're on my side of the booth. (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: I won that argument,
everybody.

DONA SARKAR: He did. Jason won an
argument, everyone. He's now on my side of the booth.
Therefore, I think we should have our connect on the air,
Jason.

JASON HOWARD: I don't think anybody wants
to listen to that.

DONA SARKAR: Jason, what are three things
you could have done better this year? (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: Well, one thing I did right
was standing on this side of the booth.

DONA SARKAR: That's about it. Now,
this is going to cost you three articles on the website described
your day-to-day. (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: I'm making my own job
harder here.

DONA SARKAR: Yes, he is.

JASON HOWARD: I don't like how this is
turning out.

DONA SARKAR: Yes, he is. All right,
so I have some questions for you.

JASON HOWARD: All right.

DONA SARKAR: You have been "Insidering"
for, what? Four years? A long time.

JASON HOWARD: A while.

DONA SARKAR: Right? Yeah, a long
time. You've been "Insidering" longer than I have, you've
been "Insidering" longer than most of the team.

So before I showed up here, you talked about three of the
Insider community's favorite features in the new update, and they
were all super exciting -- Timeline, Eye Control, Fluent
design. Those are some of my favorites, too, along with all
of the stuff around focus assistant, etcetera.

Can you share with everybody, what role did Insiders play in the
evolution of these new features? And how did their feedback
make it to the table where decisions are made?

JASON HOWARD: Well, it's -- I don't want
to expand the discussion super far, especially not coming right out
of the gate, but it's the same as any other feature that we've
introduced along the development of Windows 10.

You know, the development teams come up with this awesome idea
of something they want to put in, it shows up in a preview build
and everybody freaks out and gets excited and they're like, "Oh, my
goodness, what is this new piece of awesomeness that's here?"
And then they're, like, "Okay, well, I want it to work this way or
this part's broke, you know, what can we do to change this?
Have you guys thought about this? Because it currently
doesn't do it this way or it doesn't do this at all."

So Insiders will use the feature, they'll send us all the good
feedback. You know, they yell at us on Twitter and all that
kind of fun stuff. You know, that's one of the fun parts of
my job.

But, you know, for each of these individual features, along with
everything else that's in Windows 10, it's the same usual
process. And I don't mean to make it sound mundane, because
it's absolutely awesome, you know, it kind of goes like that.
We introduce a feature, we take in that feedback, and then we see
what changes.

It's easy to talk about the Fluent side of things because it's
one of the most obvious because it's something that everybody
sees. Like when Fluent showed up in the settings panel, it
was one of the things that people were, like, "Oh, my goodness,
this changed dramatically." Because all of a sudden there's
this smooth transition of light from, you know, item to item in the
panel, and there's this glow around whatever you're highlighted
over. It was a super obvious type thing.

For Eye Control, not everybody uses that feature. Even
though it's super important for those who do.

DONA SARKAR: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: And then, of course,
Timeline. You know, it having replaced the old Task View,
it's a paradigm shift. You know, when this was announced it
was, what, Build last year when they announced it?

DONA SARKAR: Yeah, that's
right.

JASON HOWARD: The fact that that's
available now and, you know, can literally transport you back in
time to something you were doing on a different machine on a
different day, that's huge.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: And users talking about
some of the bugs that showed up with it, and even now as, you know,
we're having this discussion, there's an interesting bug that has
shown up late that it's one of the interesting things about how
interconnected everything is within Windows. Because as I'm
standing here talking right now, there's a bug being actively
worked on by the development teams that, when it triggers, your
screen blinks.

DONA SARKAR: That's right. I've
seen it.

JASON HOWARD: And it's, like, wait, how
is this the fault of Timeline? And without getting too far
into the details of the bug itself, it's related to an empty value
being returned to the Timeline feature when it's looking for some
of your history.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: So something that you were
using on one machine that isn't even installed on the machine that
you're experiencing the bug on, it's making a call to bring some of
that Timeline activity over, and it's receiving this unexpected
empty value, and then that ends up translating into the service
crashing, which gives you the blink on the screen. But
instead of it crashing once and recovering, because every time it
keeps recalling back, it keeps looping in that same experience.

DONA SARKAR: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: So you just end up with
this just blinking screen.

DONA SARKAR: Yes.

JASON HOWARD: And once every three to
five seconds, your screen just blinks and blinks and
blinks.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah. I've hit that on
one of my machines, and that was a fun adventure. But it
reminds me of this bug that I ran into like in Windows 7 where we
were not getting the return back from Open Search. So we were
in infinite Open Search loop, and the search box would just open,
close, open, close, open, close. It was amazing. People
were like, "Oh, my God, my machine is haunted." Yeah, this is
pretty awesome. So we called that the "haunted search
box." It was pretty good.

Okay, so we know Insiders really want us to do better at letting
them know when their bugs and feedback is addressed. Can you
share with the audience a little bit about how feedback on preview
builds get processed and prioritized?

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, of course. I
mean, we did a webcast last year on this.

DONA SARKAR: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: I think it was October
where we had some of the devs and some of the PMs from the, you
know, from the Feedback Hub team come and talk to this. But
the gist of it is, you know, there's a giant deluge of feedback
that continually comes in.

DONA SARKAR: Petabytes.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. The amount of
data is --

DONA SARKAR: A day, yeah.

JASON HOWARD: It's pretty insane.
And then when you look at the number of pieces of feedback --
because, you know, all those petabytes are attached as logs and
machine info, so we know, you know, hey, is this happening on
Surface Books or is it happening on a different brand of
laptop? You know, whatever the scenario may be that's
triggering whatever bug or feature that somebody's reporting
information on.

So when a team sees all of this, because the feedback comes in
based upon how it gets filed. And so there's a primary
category and then a secondary subcategory. And, you know,
each one of these categories is assigned to a team. And the
team will go through and look at the feedback that has come in and
they look at, hey, so for this development cycle, we have, you
know, three or four or whatever number of core priorities, things
we're trying to land, right?

And so whether it's revamping an old feature, creating a new
feature, or in some circumstances, you know, if they feel that
their product needs some extra special attention they'll be, like,
"Hey, we're going to focus on making the quality of our feature
really good in this particular release, and then we'll add stuff
later."

So all the feedback that comes in, they take a look at how many
pieces of feedback have come in, what's been up-voted the most,
what's going to have the greatest impact, and they compare all of
that with what are the big milestones that we have on our internal
roadmap?

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: And so then it kind of gets
shuffled and prioritized and stacked and even with some bugs that
come in where it may not have been something that was expected to
be on our radar, if there's a big bug that slipped up and it's
affecting a lot of people, it's going to get prioritized.

So to go back to Fluent for a moment, there's been a big cry to
have Fluent introduced into the Feedback Hub itself for a
while.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: But one of the big things
that Feedback Hub has been as a team that, you know, for that
particular application, the team has been working on is in being
more robust when it comes to log collection.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: So that there's less
additional tools that users will have to run and all that kind of
thing. Because if you can streamline the pipeline of the
intake process, then all the engineering teams within Microsoft,
you can get consolidated in one process, everybody knows where to
go for the data. You're not having to have users install
extra apps or run troubleshooters and all this kind of
stuff.

DONA SARKAR: Or go back and forth with
the dev six times, like we've had to in the past.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And that's
another interesting thing is, you know, a dev can take a piece of
feedback and say, "Oh, I need more information," and enable extra
log collection so people can resubmit that.

DONA SARKAR: Which is super
cool.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. So, you know,
using all those processes together, you know, the teams will
determine, "Hey, what is the thing that we should focus on
now?"

DONA SARKAR: I totally agree with
that. One of the things that we've been hearing from Insiders
is whether the bug is addressed or not, they just want to know,
right? And I like that. I love that idea. And I
think so far, we've been really one-to-one with letting Insiders
know when their bug is fixed. Like, you know, we did the
project where we popped up the notifications like, "Hey, Insider,
your bug is fixed, thank you, it's in this build." And then
we also sent e-mail in case they're not looking at SIFS or have
them disabled.

But then we realized that Insiders are not able to see all of
the things they may have experienced, but didn't necessarily file
or up-vote. So I am going to do an experiment starting this
month on tweeting out the bug fixes that have been impactful that a
lot of people up-voted.

So I'm looking at bugs that have, like, 30-plus up-votes and
just doing a tweet when it's fixed and in which build, because I
think that a lot of Insiders will be, like, "Oh, yeah, I ran into
that, I couldn't isolate it or trap it, but I did run into
it." So that should be kind of interesting.

I asked the Insiders last week on Twitter if that would be
interesting and everyone was like, "Yes, we want to see
that." I said, "Okay, it might be noisy and annoying, but
we'll see."

Okay, how do new features get chosen to be developed?
Please tell the Insiders, because they all want to know.

JASON HOWARD: That's fun. I kind of
alluded to a little bit of it in my last response, right?
Where, you know, teams figure out what they want to work on, and
they go and work on it. But it's a little more complicated
than that.

As a company, Microsoft has a direction that it's headed
in. And it's the responsibility of all the teams that are
working on -- at least in this case within Windows, right, to make
sure that their work ladders up to meeting those overall
objectives.

Each team, of course, gets some leeway to work on special side
projects or things they think are important, but the overall
message of, "Hey, these are the things that are important for
Microsoft as a company, and these are the features that we want to
bring to Windows, these are the goals for the product
itself." Each of the teams, they have a responsibility to
ensure that what they're working on drives to the mission that we
as a company are pushing forward to.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: So part of it comes from
top-down, which is, hey, somebody makes a decision at the top, you
know, an idea that Satya has or somebody in the SLT at that level
-- SLT being the senior leadership team. Somebody comes up
with an idea, they get buy-off on it, and then it filters down in
the teams that are going to be impacted, right? Because
there's tons of sub teams that make up the whole Windows
Engineering organization.

So each of those teams will figure out which pieces of the
project do they own, what is it going to take for them to, you
know, put their piece of the pie together? You know, put
their piece of the puzzle in there, and then that becomes part of
their roadmap, whether it's in the current development cycle, the
next one, two out, three out. And for some of them,
especially like if you look in the deployment space, some of the
things that they've been working on started back in RS1.

DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah.

JASON HOWARD: And even now that we're
just kicking off RS5, you know, it's still going and it will be
there in 6 and whatever names come beyond and into the
future. There's stuff that they're doing now that is just a
-- we'll just call it a multi-year process, because it's not just
-- you know, it's not just flipping a switch and all of a sudden,
it's there and everything's great. If it was, hey, you know,
development would be a lot easier than it is.

DONA SARKAR: Absolutely. Most of
our features don't get done in six months and they don't get done
in a week or two weeks. I've seen, for myself, like just
working on the HoloLens project, that started in 2008 and didn't
release until like 2014. So it's not small, this Windows
development thing. And even just like, you know, making
changes to an app, that is not small because you change one thing,
and it may have, you know, like you were saying, these
repercussions in all parts of the operating system -- years
lasting.

JASON HOWARD: It brings up an interesting
point for me because one of the curiosities that I see sometimes is
when somebody says, "Well, I reported this last week, why isn't it
fixed?"

DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah.

JASON HOWARD: It's tough when you're
working in an organization this big sometimes to get attention to
the right thing -- at least when you feel it's the right
thing. And it goes to the point we made earlier about a
competing priority.

There is shuffling that happens within teams and sometimes it
just requires a sizable chunk of the day to be, like, "Look, we're
going to impact this many people if we don't fix this."

DONA SARKAR: Exactly.

JASON HOWARD: Or, "We are impacting this
many people by not having this implemented."

DONA SARKAR: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: And, again, that's where
some of the ideas of what should we do next, that's where some of
that stuff comes from. And that's the suggestions from
Insiders, that's suggestions from, you know, enterprises and
companies that we work with and that run our products and
services. It really is global input both on the individual
scale as well as being on larger scales from those that we partner
with.

DONA SARKAR: A very real example was
Creators, where when Surface launched, one of the coolest things it
had was inking capability. And initially, it was like, okay,
this works great in OneNote. And we got so much feedback from
Insiders, starting 2014, like, "Hey, we're artists, we're writers,
we're illustrators, we work in education, and we feel like there
can be more inking in the operating system. Since you have a
device with a pen, let's put more stuff in the operating system for
pens."

So the entire year of Creators Update and Fall Creators Update
was all based on providing opportunities for those audiences, which
I really liked because that was one of the first times we've really
looked at consumers, broad consumers, who, you know, people aren't
really catering to. Right? Not many people are
creating technology for people who write, even though that's
something everyone in the world does, right, at some point or
another.

And I really like that we spent a year working on, you know,
these really awesome inking features. And many enterprises
are now saying, "This is awesome, we like this a lot," especially
for notetaking and such and such. And as we translate like my
horrible handwriting into auto typing and such.

Okay. So we love all of our Insiders, but my goodness, you
guys can be a little creative sometimes. Sometimes. So,
Jason, what is the craziest request you've ever received from an
Insider?

JASON HOWARD: Oh, goodness.
(Laughter.) I've got years' worth of thinking back to do on
this one.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah, exactly, because
you're engaged in some very exciting conversations
sometimes.

JASON HOWARD: That is true. One of
the things that I can't do that I get asked, and it surprises me
how often I get asked this, is: You're Microsoft, why can't
you just remote into my machine and fix it?

DONA SARKAR: Oh, my.
Okay.

JASON HOWARD: I'm, like, "Um --"

DONA SARKAR: I'm sure that would go super
well.

JASON HOWARD: I do not want to be on your
computer.

DONA SARKAR: No.

JASON HOWARD: Not to mention the legal
side of it that I don't want to have to wade through.

DONA SARKAR: No.

JASON HOWARD: I just don't want to be in
people's personal machines, right?

DONA SARKAR: No.

JASON HOWARD: It sounds funny. The
thing is, oftentimes, the things that people are requesting that I
fix aren't really things that I could log in and fix anyway.
Yeah, it's easy to change settings, it's easy to go through and
delete some files and clear up disk space and things like that, but
those are things that I can guide users through. And we've
got documentation and things like that I can refer them to,
right? I don't need to log in and do that stuff.

But it's, like, "Hey, I'm getting specific error code this
that's preventing me from updating this Store app." I will
tell you, there is no magic wand for me to go into your machine and
wave and just magically fix that for you, unfortunately. Do I
wish there was? Oh, absolutely. Right? It would
make my job a lot easier. But in the grand scheme of things,
that's not really something I can do.

Something else that's super fun is when I get asked to
specifically push down an update faster.

JASON HOWARD: I don't know where you're
located, but those are like physical hardware property things that
I really can't control.

DONA SARKAR: Uh-uh. (Negative.)

JASON HOWARD: And it goes to show the
difference in -- it's one of the things that I absolutely love
about this program, but it can prove interesting at times.
It's the difference in like -- what's the right way to say
this?

DONA SARKAR: Words.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, I know, words are
difficult sometimes. How connected a user is into the
intricacies of technology. That's not exactly how I want to
say it, but it takes work and it takes time to make things change
and make them work the way you want to.

DONA SARKAR: And it's human
made.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And you know
there are still physical limitations. You know, I would love
a new update to download to my machine -- like here on campus, I
want it to download in two minutes. It doesn't.

DONA SARKAR: No. Which has the best
connectivity in the world.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. I mean, you
know, this is Microsoft's headquarters, of course.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: But at some point in time,
sometimes it's just about setting realistic expectations.

DONA SARKAR: Agree on that. I once
got a request from someone to come to their school in Singapore and
yell at the principal to let them install Insider builds on all the
machines.

JASON HOWARD: That actually seems like a
laudable goal.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah. It seemed pretty
legit. I was thinking about it. Like, this wouldn't be
the worst, we could go to Singapore and yell. We go lots of
places and yell, so we can yell in Singapore, that's fine. We
yell, that's fine. (Laughter.)

Okay, so Windows is an OS that serves more than a billion people
in lots of languages -- let's say "lots." It's crazy
complicated, takes a lot of work to get updates ready for the
public -- like today. So why do we torture ourselves with
this? Why do we ship twice a year to the general
public? Why do we ship to Insiders sometimes three or four
times a week? Why do we do this, Jason? Why?

JASON HOWARD: Because it's awesome?
I mean, it really is. When you think about Microsoft five
years ago, ten years ago, there was the perception of it being a
slow-moving iceberg, really, where it would take two, three, four
or more years to get this gigantic update that would come
out. And it would be almost a wholesale overhaul of the
entire OS.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: The look would be
different, the feel would be almost completely different. I
mean, especially like when you look at the jump from Windows 7 to
Windows 8, like we threw the world for a loop with that
one.

JASON HOWARD: And then that little hop in
the middle called "Vista" that everybody --

DONA SARKAR: Yep. I was
there. I was there.

JASON HOWARD: All those question marks
that came up. So not only was it about getting features out
to customers faster, there was a lot to be said for getting bug
fixes and just general changes out. And I mean all of this
culminated in the reason the Insider Program was created was the
old -- let's call it what it is, the old beta program was, "Hey,
we're a year out from a release approximately, we're going to give
you a build of what we've built so far, so you can start."

DONA SARKAR: And it's pretty
locked. Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. There's not
much that's going to change.

DONA SARKAR: Other than like UI things or
maybe a driver or some app compat.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And users
would, you know, test it out, check it out, throw some feedback
over the wall on User Voice or whatever other channel they decided
to use, and who knows if it would get fixed or not?

So as the world of technology itself continues to evolve with
speed to market becoming vastly important, there's and point in
sitting on a new feature for two years because, number one,
somebody else is going to beat you to market with it.

DONA SARKAR: Absolutely.

JASON HOWARD: Somebody else already knows
about it and is probably already working on it. But who wants
to be sitting on a broken build for two years?
Right?

DONA SARKAR: No one.

JASON HOWARD: I mean, we've got Patch
Tuesday or whatnot, but some things require a bit more lifting than
can just be dropped out in a monthly servicing-type
release.

So now with our new -- I'll just call it a sped-up model, right,
of Windows as a service of us dropping a few times a year, new
features don't require a two- or three-year holding period --

DONA SARKAR: No.

JASON HOWARD: -- before people get to
come and check out the latest and greatest. Like I mentioned,
the Insider Program, it's not, "Hey, we're going to give you this a
year ahead of time, and you'll get what you get when we release it
later."

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: You know, users have that
return voice channel between the Feedback Hub and reaching out to
--

DONA SARKAR: Us.

JASON HOWARD: -- Microsoft engineers
directly.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: You know, that's one of the
fun things, like I mentioned earlier about being on Twitter all the
time -- it's really fun to connect with people that are super
passionate about Windows and changing the future of it that love to
share their voice.

Now, granted, you know, it's the same as with anything, you
know? We don't always take every single piece of
feedback. It's not always going to show up in the
product.

DONA SARKAR: No.

JASON HOWARD: Especially when you have
two people that have diametrically opposed ideas.

DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

JASON HOWARD: I like this in light mode,
I don't like it in dark mode.

DONA SARKAR: I like this in hate mode,
yeah.

JASON HOWARD: It's not always possible to
make both at the same time. You just can't do it. But,
really, a lot of it has to do with making sure that the technology
we're creating gets out to users in a fast, and hopefully friendly
manner. You know, even our updates have gotten way better
than they used to be.

DONA SARKAR: Oh, way better.

JASON HOWARD: So between that, making
sure that we're staying more reliable with, you know, the
productivity side of the OS, you know, those features showing up,
and then making sure the OS is actually functioning correctly.

DONA SARKAR: That's right.

JASON HOWARD: Like the number of
unexpected crashes and things like that. We continue to get
better on those metrics year over year and release over
release.

And then, of course, there's the entire side of getting the
features out, like I mentioned before, but if we don't do it,
somebody else will.

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: And I would rather us be
doing it and helping drive the technology, the sphere of what's
coming next, as opposed to being reactive and being, like, "Oh,
they did it, okay, let's hurry up and catch up to what they're
doing," just to try to achieve parity. Because you can't be a
leader in the marketplace if you're chasing parity.

DONA SARKAR: No. I just like the
fact that people are heard in real time. Right? Like we
rolled out this thing, you know, last Monday and then we get
feedback on Monday. And what's so curious to me is it's still
hard for some of the more traditional engineers to wrap their heads
around. At least once a week, I get an e-mail from an
engineer in the company who says, "Hey, I checked this code into
the build, it's going to hit WinMain soon, how do I get it to
Insiders." I said, "No, you're done. Your part's now
done. If you checked in code, it's going to Insiders in two
days." They said, "How does that happen?" I said, "It
just happens. They get the exact same build we have two days
later."

Everyone is still kind of wrapping their heads around this, that
we can just ship externally, we've been doing it for four years
now, it's not new. But to traditional engineers, it's still
mind boggling that things can go out to all the customers who've
opted into this, not just like, you know, specific partners and not
just like super NDA people, but to anyone who wants it, they can
get our fresh coat of paint work two days later. So that's
fun.

JASON HOWARD: I mean, the fact that that
curtain got lifted and that we're showing people so much --

DONA SARKAR: In real time.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. Of what used to
just be, you know, hidden and behind the scenes.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: You know, you don't talk
about kind of, you know, for pop culture reference, you don't talk
about Fight Club, right?

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: The fact that we're showing
a lot of what's actually being done that quickly. And whether
it makes it into the product or not. I mean, there's been
stuff we've checked in that, oops, we have to --

DONA SARKAR: Backsies!
Backsies! Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, we're thinking that
back out. We're showing the human side of code development
along the way.

DONA SARKAR: Which is it's messy and
awesome in real time. All right, what's your favorite part of
the job, other than being on our team?

JASON HOWARD: Besides having you as my
boss --

DONA SARKAR: Obviously.

JASON HOWARD: That's definitely the best
part of the job. (Laughter.)

DONA SARKAR: I'm not yelling at him
behind the scenes, Insiders, nor am I beating him with the cake
spoon.

JASON HOWARD: I'm saying that so she
doesn't get mad at me from earlier of stealing this particular
microphone.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah. Jason's not
going to have an office this afternoon. Stay in the
booth.

JASON HOWARD: I know, I'm going to just
be sitting cross-legged in the hall with my laptop in my lap.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: That's going to give it the
real name of a "laptop."

DONA SARKAR: Yeah, in the
hallway.

JASON HOWARD: It'll be sitting in my
lap. Favorite part of my job? It has to be the
interaction with people from around the globe. The fact that
we have these huge fans that take time out of their personal lives
and out of their day, whether they're at work or at home or, you
know, spending time with their family or whatever, to engage with
us, to come and talk shop with us about our products, the things
that impact their life to the extent that they are willing to
dedicate their time, their emotions, their energy into helping make
it better than it is, and hopefully the best that it can
become. And the fact that I get to play a role in spending
time with them and somehow I manage to get paid to do that, that
still boggles my mind. But I couldn't think of a better thing
to be doing at work.

DONA SARKAR: What's keeping you up at
night? Good and bad? Other than your back
pain.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, that's not
fun.

DONA SARKAR: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Making sure people are
heard. Going through the long list of feedback that we get
and finding what I will call the "diamonds in the rough" of
feedback that may be underrepresented, but that is going to have a
huge impact.

DONA SARKAR: The millions represent the
billions.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And when you
only hear the voice of two or three people complaining about
something, and it's really impactful to them, figuring out that
this is really going to affect a lot of people, and it takes data,
it takes time to compile that and figure out, you know, hey, how
does this scale in the broader scheme of things? Are these
people representing just themselves or a ton of other people, like
you just mentioned?

DONA SARKAR: Right.

JASON HOWARD: I'm constantly thinking
about how do I do a better job of this, what is it that I missed
that's going to affect a lot of people? What can I stop
that's going to have a broad effect on people? And how can I
keep them from having that bad experience?

DONA SARKAR: I really love that,
too. I like when you and, like, two or three Insiders are
troubleshooting some super-random-sounding thing. But then it
winds up being like a big deal that affects, like, 100,000
people.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, we've caught a few of
those along the way.

DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.

JASON HOWARD: You know, two or three
people, and the next thing you know it's like --

DONA SARKAR: Oh, a lot.

JASON HOWARD: Oh, this is something we
really need to pay attention to.

DONA SARKAR: Exactly. And that's
when Jason writes an article and explains things in words.
Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, there's another blog
post coming.

DONA SARKAR: Yes, there's more blog posts
coming, Insiders. So you know who to nag.

All right, speaking of nagging and yelling, it's time to go yell
at some execs, because it is Global Rollout Day, and we have to go
and keep an eye on things and see how our baby's doing in the
world.

JASON HOWARD: Indeed.

DONA SARKAR: Indeed. All right,
thank you, Jason, for answering all these questions.

JASON HOWARD: Thanks, Dona.

DONA SARKAR: And, everyone, have a
wonderful day.

JASON HOWARD: Thank you.

JASON HOWARD: That's a wrap for Episode
15. We hope you're excited to test drive these favorite
features and more via the Windows 10 April 2018 Update.

Have you missed any of the past episodes? You can also
find them on the Windows Insider website at insider.windows.com.

Thanks for listening, and until next time, Insiders.

NARRATION: The Windows Insider
Podcast is produced by Microsoft Production Studios and the
Windows Insider team, which includes Tyler Ahn -- that's me --
Michelle Paison, Ande Harwood, and Kristie Wang.

Visit us on the Web at insider.windows.com. Follow
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Support for the Windows Insider Podcast comes from
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Please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get
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Moral support and inspiration come from Ninja Cat, reminding us
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